The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off (8 page)

‘Look,' I said, ‘we haven't got anyone else. And she looks quite sporty. Have you seen her doing cartwheels?'

‘But cartwheels aren't allowed in football,'
said The Moan.

‘It's just an example. She might be one of those girls who are really good at football. I saw a film about them once.'

‘Yeah,' said Jamie thoughtfully. ‘I saw that. She runs fast too. And running
is
allowed in football. In fact it's, erm, the opposite of not allowed . . .'

‘Compulsory,' said Noah.

‘Yeah, that,' said Jamie.

‘She's your sister, Phillip,' said Noah. ‘Is she good at sport?'

‘Well,' said The Moan reluctantly, ‘she's in lots of sports clubs. She goes off to do stuff almost every evening. I don't pay much attention to it. But yes, actually, I think she
is
sporty. When she throws things at me, she usually hits the target.'

‘There's another thing,' I said. ‘I feel really rotten about what we did to her . . .'

‘What
we
did?' said Noah.

‘OK, what
I
did. And this way we get a player who might actually be quite good,
and I can sort of say sorry to her.'

‘But do we really want a girl in our team?' said Phillip. ‘Especially if she's my sister?'

‘In life you don't always get exactly what you want,' I said. ‘Sometimes you have to do something because it's right, even when you don't really want to.'

There was nothing much more to be said, and, anyway, just then Jennifer shouted from outside, ‘I'm going home.'

‘Hang on,' I shouted back, and we all crawled out again.

Jennifer was waiting for us. ‘What were you talking about?' she asked.

‘Well, er, you, basically.'

‘Oh.'

‘We'd like to ask you something.'

‘What? It better not be to do with showing my bum.'

‘No, it's nothing to do with that. If you want to, you can play in our football team.'

‘That's not really a question.'

I sighed. Jennifer wasn't making this easy.

‘OK then, will you play in our football team?'

‘Say please.'

‘Please.'

‘No.'

‘No?'

‘No. Not unless you say how sorry you are.'

‘I've already said sorry.'

‘Say it again.'

‘I'm really sorry for what I did.'

‘And you have to give me a kiss.'

‘WHAT!'

‘A kiss.'

‘That's definitely not fair.'

Then I heard Noah behind me say, ‘Go on, Ludo. You've gone this far. It won't kill you.'

I think the boys might have been enjoying this.

‘All right then,' I said miserably, ‘but not on the lips.'

‘Yuck, no. On the cheek.'

‘You don't mean your bum cheek, do you? Because if you do, you can just forget it and the whole deal is off.'

‘You are
so
immature. No, not on my bottom, although that would be what I believe is called poetic justice. I mean here, on my face.'

She pointed to her left cheek. Someone pushed me from behind. I walked slowly forwards, aiming my lips exactly where she had pointed. I didn't want her to say I'd done it in the wrong place so she could make me kiss her again. But as I stepped forward I put my foot in a Smarties-tube fart-bomb trap, so a horrible smell came out at the same time as the kiss, which actually landed on her arm, because I'd half fallen into the hole, and that all led to quite a lot of commotion, with Jennifer pulling away, going ‘Pooooooooohhhh,' and the boys all
rolling about laughing, and me collapsing on the floor.

But then Jennifer came back and helped me up, saying, ‘Good trap,' and we all sort of laughed together, not anyone laughing at anyone else, but all of us laughing at everything.

At five to three we all met at the pitch. Only Phillip had a real football kit; the rest of us were wearing ordinary white T-shirts and shorts, but I still think we all looked pretty good. I was surprised to see that there were quite a lot of spectators, maybe thirty kids.

Amazingly, Mrs Cake was there as well, with Trixie. Trixie was on a lead, but she still kept leaping up trying to bite the nearest child. I don't suppose there was a lot of excitement in Mrs Cake's life, so watching some little kids get kicked
around by some slightly bigger kids probably counted as entertainment to her.

Anyway, having a big crowd there to watch piled even more pressure on me. I'd never played in front of a crowd before. None of us had.

Jennifer was standing there with some of her friends. She was wearing a pink tracksuit, which was pretty bad,
but I suppose it was the only one she owned.

The Dockery team were kicking the ball around. Just as I suspected, there were six of them. There was Dockery, Stanton, Furbank, Larkin (dribbling and drooling at the same time), and the two others whose names I could never remember. They all had proper kit. They even had
shin pads. That seemed a bit strange to me –
we
were going to get kicked, but
they
had the shin pads! I suppose there's always a chance that when you try to kick someone, you might get it a bit wrong and hit them with your shin instead, so they were probably guarding against that. I imagined their mums sending them off to play, saying, ‘Do be careful, dear, when you kick those little children. Make sure you don't hurt yourselves.' They were laughing a lot (the Dockery Gang, I mean, not their mums), and generally looking smug.

Carl was standing by himself near the halfway line, wearing a white T-shirt. But there was something odd about it. It was too chunky and wrinkled. He looked smug as well, or rather like someone trying not to look smug, but failing. I think they were waiting till the last minute to take maximum advantage of the trick, trying to make us look as stupid as possible.

Well, this time the trick was going to be turned back on them.

I marched straight up to Carl. He started to say something, but I spoke over him in a loud voice so that everyone could hear – the rest of the Dockery Gang plus all the kids watching.

‘You're sacked,' I said.

‘B-b-but . . .'

‘I'm sorry, but we've decided you're not good enough to play in our team. In fact you're completely rubbish. And your hair looks stupid. We've got someone good to play instead of you.'

‘You can't sack me, because I'm . . . I mean, I was . . . I mean . . .'

But I'd already turned my back on him and gone to rejoin my team. We all looked towards the sideline, knowing that the eyes of the Dockery Gang as well as the crowd would follow us. Then I waved to Jennifer, who, grinning from ear to ear, took off her track suit and ran out to join us.

Underneath the horrible pink tracksuit she was wearing a proper white football kit that used to belong to Phillip, and she looked really good. I'd warned her against doing any cartwheels, but I think she probably knew that already. She ran so fast her feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.

I looked at the opposition. They didn't know what to think about Jennifer. You could see from their faces that they wanted to laugh, but there was also something a bit like fear in their eyes. They could see that Jennifer was fast and sporty, and I reckon they were imagining what everyone would say if they got beat by a team with a girl in it.

Then Dockery stepped forward. ‘No girls allowed!' he shouted.

‘Says who?' I shouted back. ‘We never said anything about girls playing or not playing, so that means they can. If you're afraid to play us, then fine. We win.'

There was a sort of murmur from the crowd then. I think they saw that we were being fair and Dockery wasn't.

Dockery clamped his mouth shut after that. Carl was still hovering about, unsure what to do or where to go. ‘Come on then,' Dockery shouted at him. ‘Sort your kit out.'

Then Carl took off his white shirt and underneath it he was wearing a blue one.

The crowd laughed at that, and someone shouted out, ‘Cheats', but when Dockery went over towards them, most of the kids went quiet. They were still scared of him. And so was I.

Noah, Oliver, Luke, Jamie, The Moan and Jennifer gathered round while I gave them a last quick team talk.

‘Let's try to pass the ball. And if we can, we should probably try to score. Oh, and we should try to stop them from scoring. If we can score more goals than them, then I think we've got a good chance of winning. Any questions?'

There weren't any. I then got them all to stand in their positions. Jennifer was going to be our lone striker, taking Carl's place.

The opposition lined up in their half. My heart was racing. They all looked so big and strong, and we looked so weak and feeble, especially little Luke and Oliver, who were three years younger than most of the kids in Dockery's team. It felt like we were up against a gang of giants and ogres and trolls.

Someone shouted out, ‘OK, let's go,' and the next thing we knew they were all charging towards us. They hadn't bothered with a proper kick-off. We weren't even ready. Carl passed the ball to Dockery, who ran down the middle of the pitch towards our goal. Luke tried to tackle him, but Dockery just shoved him aside. I shouted ‘Foul' and ‘Free kick' but they didn't stop. Noah tried to get to him, but he wasn't fast enough. Then Dockery was right in front of our goal, with just Jamie in the way. Jamie's legs were shaking, and he held his hands and the gloves with the wrong fingers out in front of him. Dockery could have easily
slid the ball past him into the net, but he decided to blast it.

And blast it he did, right into Jamie's face. It bounced away and went out for a corner.

It must have hurt like mad, but Jamie didn't cry, which made me really proud.

There were complaints from some of Dockery's team, but he silenced them with a glare. Larkin took the corner. I managed to get to it first and blindly whacked up the pitch, just trying to get it out of the danger zone.